In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
-Robert frost
He sat with his face buried between his knees, exactly at the same spot where he had sat with his father, spent and tired after a long long journey through realms and distances. His dad had decided that he needed to know what beats in that small boxlike chamber beneath his bed , when even after repeated admonishments not to repeat his act he had masturbrated causing a tsunami in one of the seas that lay in that one beloved planet of his dad-earth. They had traveled a lot that day, seen empires being built, new things being created, seen love and war, seen how his father threw random things from his pocket and was amused at how those creatures called men cried out in ecstasy whenever they found any of those- much like he used to when his mother hid something edible under his pillow for him to find in the morning. He had seen people lose things and celebrate when they were found in a different era different situation as if those were new. He had seen them kill and be killed. Finally, they had sat at that place which his father had said was dear to him. It was the very place that someone who was called his own father's son by men was hung out to dry in the light of that orb he had in his room which these people called son. Mom always said that the man who had to undergo such a harsh treatment at the hands of his own brethren was father's illegitimate son. " He must have been thinking about that Mary when he was penetrating me! How else can one be born without the shag?" She always loathed that bastard son of his father, so much that when he had come after his death in this world to visit their place and live in the other comparatively bigger enclosure called heaven where one was literally a member of their own family, she had henpecked dad so much that he was forced to send his unacknowledged boy back to this small oval hearth of a box again. Dad has asked him then about the lesson he had learnt that day. Uncomfortably shifting and nervously drawing patterns in the sand below his feet he had replied,"they hold on. They need a point, a center, a beginning, a base towards which they may gravitate. Once they think they have found it, they cling to it and try to annihilate any threat to their grip." Dad had smiled and picked him up in his arms, he knew how to observe.
Dad was just like his own masterpieces. His differences with his father had grown in proportion to his age. Father was obsessed with these creatures and was never ready to free them from the pins by which he had pinned them. He considered himself a shepherd and in no case was he ready to let the lambs grow into lions. Both had suffered but father still didn't understand until the rage in him grew into blind fury and he had pierced his own father's heart with a blade which was smelted out in that big furnace in their backyard which humans called hell. He had thrown that ball into that very blood, so that all may change and its inhabitants may break free of those ancient chains put on them by his father.
Five years had elapsed since then, five tumultuous years during which he as well as all that his father had built had taken a nosedive. Man was not free, he was in a mess. Without the rings to hang the rope of his life through and without the roof to which the roof to which that ring was connected, he was lost. The fire in hell without being fanned had almost extinguished, the light shining in heaven had gone out and he, the one responsible for maintaining all was confused himself. It was as if he too needed an axis around which to rotate. He who detested them more than anything else was in fear of the guilt associated with his impending failure. Maybe he could follow suite of his brother and end it all. Better still, he could just claim ignorance from all that was imminent. Rubbing the furrows in his forehead he looked upwards. A small bird was bringing twigs from its old shattered nest lying beneath the weight of a broken branch and making a new one on another branch.
Why be concerned with all that will happen the next day? Resting for the night was all that mattered, not the branch that lay broken or the new one or the shelter being made. Teacher came in all sizes , he mused as he got up, dusted his ass and moved on.
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